SOCIAL COHESION AND TOLERANCE

II. contemporary threats to social cohesion

There are numerous identifiable demographic, socio-economic and political trends and processes which have been associated with a general breakdown of social cohesion. These trends and processes have been long in the making; however, their present juxtaposition has arguably had a kind of synergistic, or cumulative and compounded, effect with regard to the perceived breakdown of social cohesion. Together they have created, in David Marquand’s words, a ‘tense, mistrustful, anxiety-haunted society’ (quoted in Hobsbawm 1996). Among the most far-reaching changes contributing to such are the following.

economic restructuring

The intensified linkage of local social conditions with activities and decisions within world financial, commodity and labour markets is increasingly apparent -- and in many places, its consequences are devastating. As Ralf Dahrendorf (1995: 39) observes, at present we are clearly faced with ‘the condition of global competitiveness coupled with social disintegration.’ Increasingly over the past three decades, globalisation in the form of processes of structural transformation have impacted severely, in many ways, on people throughout Europe and the world.

In industrial countries perhaps the most fundamental feature of structural transformation has been the massive decline in manufacturing employment. At the same time -- and particularly in light of newer, severe forms of international competition -- we have been witness to the massive relocation of capital, jobs and manufacturing to areas of the globe where labour is cheaper. Broadly with respect to jobs, these kinds of shifts have brought about a considerable move away from relatively stable work conditions characterised by institutionalised wage agreements and strong trade unions, internal labour markets within large firms, and secure, tenured and full-time employment. In turn, we have seen the emergence of new socio-economic patterns directly resulting from both structural and business ethos modes of changes. Patterns of this kind include:

rising levels of unemployment

entrenchment of the long-term unemployed

shrinking labour force

pressure to reduce labour costs; hence, lower pay for employees

increased number of working hours

reduced demand for traditional skilled labour

growth in temporary, contract and part-time work (including an absence of defined terms and conditions, pension provisions and personal insurance)

Increased number of people having no formal employment protection, no right to appeal against unfair dismissal, and no statutory redundancy payments

growth in ethnic entrepreneurship

proliferation of ‘sweatshop’ industries

expanding informal economy

In contrast to earlier, more stable conditions characterising employment, insecurity is currently the order of the day. More and more, opportunities for work and flows of income are variable and unpredictable. These kinds of changes add to a growing polarisation not only between employed and unemployed, but between secure, highly skilled, well paid workers and the larger proportion of insecure, unskilled, low paid workers. Further, Blotevogel & King (1996: 142) point out, ‘The gender dimension is critical to this shift... since women are greatly over represented in the new flexible yet precarious sectors of casual, part-time and short-contract employment.’

It is important to bear in mind that social and spatial development, dismantling and redistribution is happening unevenly, and taking different forms, among specific groups and in a variety of regions and parts of cities. This is producing ‘a complicated map of social disadvantage’ (Mingione 1996: 18) including pockets of poverty and areas where there seems to be little hope of economic regeneration. Some of the sharpest contours of this ‘complicated map,’ moreover, are discernible in urban areas precisely where immigrant and ethnic minorities are most concentrated. The differential impact of contemporary economic restructuration on has produced or deepened a multiplicity of forms of ethnicised/racialised marginalization, exclusion and poverty (see, for instance, Hamnet & Randolph 1992, Mingione 1995, Schierup 1997).

These interrelated facets of socio-economic change naturally both influence and are influenced by major forms of recent change in political policy contexts.

political restructuring

In Europe, the uncertainties and insecurities associated with economic restructuring have been key factors in fuelling a political drive toward dismantling the institutions of the post-war welfare state. A variety of financial constraints, along with diminished tax receipts and the privatization of numerous public sectors, have posed critical questions as to how what’s left of the welfare state is to be financed. It is the cutting back of social programmes -- considered as a break in the social contract or as the revoking of Marshallian social citizenship -- which many observers see as catalyst to societal breakdown.

The rise of neo-liberal political philosophy has driven many of the processes of political restructuring over the past two decades. As mentioned above, a key aspect of its vision of society is bringing the market principle, along with notions of self-responsibility and individualism, to almost every sphere of politics, economics and society. Ironically, this principle has been introduced by central government in a top-down, and very often undiscriminating and haphazard, manner. Aspects of political change which have subsequently emerged, and impacted dramatically on social cohesion, include:

disempowering of trades unions

severe curbs on public spending

privatisation of national industries and many public services

compulsory competitive tendering for public sector contracts (often with the effect of ensuring the worst conditions for employees and unsatisfactory services for users)

deregulation across a variety of sectors (especially affecting finance and business competition)

favouring of ‘managerialism’ and technocratic approaches to governmental tasks (over, for instance, releasing of public funds and democratic involvement of persons in decisions affecting their own situations)

proliferation of non-elected, unaccountable quasi-public bodies (quangos) for management and development of public services

more restrictive access to social assistance/welfare benefits (including the draconian measure, recently declared illegal by the Court of Appeal, which sought the complete withdrawal of support to asylum seekers)

new clampdowns on immigration and suspected illegals (legitimated by a discourse presuming foreigners to be significant threats to limited public resources)

Such policies and processes which, Ralf Dahrendorf (1995: 38) suggests, have brought about ‘the new inequality’ can be seen as fuelling a process of ‘inequalisation, the opposite of levelling, building paths to the top for some and digging holes for others, creating cleavages, splitting.’ The consequences for social cohesion, however defined, are devastating. ‘Such a divergence of the life chances of large social groups,’ Dahrendorf (Ibid.) observes, ‘is incompatible with civil society.’ The most socially stigmatized, spatially segregated and economically disadvantaged also become the most politically excluded.

The combined forces of economic and political restructuring, along with the new social fissions created in their wake, have also threatened a key socio-psychological source of social cohesion, the idea of ‘the nation’. This threat has emerged from at least two ‘directions’.

challenges to the idea of ‘the nation’

...(a) from above

The changes associated with globalization (here considered as processes involving the intensified linkage and increased scope, scale and speed of world-wide economic activity) are now so pervasive that national governments arguably no longer hold the keys to their own national larders. The flow and control of a variety of forms of investment, currency trading, commodity markets, and labour pools are increasingly determined by agents and forces above and beyond the reins of nation-state policy. To the extent that such globalizing processes are controlled or kept within some bounds, this is increasingly managed by inter-governmental agencies (such as GATT, G-7, NAFTA, and the EU). For the nation-state, prerogatives and margins for manoeuvres in economic policy are greatly reduced. While such a condition may actually be used to mobilise national sentiment (as witnessed daily in Britain through ‘Brussels-bashing’ by Eurosceptic politicians and newspapers), an overarching sense of national weakness, helplessness -- or, indeed, crisis -- remains.

The globalization of cultural forms and images too, some say, minimize the significance of national cultures-which-bind. As Ulf Hannerz (1989: 69-70) observes, today nations ‘have only a limited part in the global cultural flow.... Much of the traffic in culture... is transnational rather than international. It ignores, subverts, and devalues rather than celebrates national boundaries.’

challenges to the idea of ‘the nation’

...(b) from below

Over the past twenty or so years, numerous Western nation-states have witnessed the increasing organisation and articulation of particularistic identities, values and interests. The progressive segmentation of society, in many ways associated with or deepened by economic and political restructuring, has stimulated new forms of awareness of diversity and an increasing pluralism of demands on politics and public resources. Ultimately, the imagined community of the nation is seriously challenged. This has occurred in a number of cross-cutting ways.

In broadest terms, conditions of modernity have produced a perpetual functional differentiation of society. This is described by Jürgen Habermas (1994: 31) as the acquisition of ever greater access to, and participation in, an ever greater number of ‘subsystems’ (including markets, work environments, public services, associations and communities). Changing relationships and social patterns are often related to such differentiation, producing for individuals a multiplication of social networks (see Rogers & Vertovec 1995). In other words, the social and institutional lives of people are arguably ever more complex, even disjunct.

Further compounding these shifts is an endemic characteristic of cities, where ‘The modern urban phenomenon remains basically a theatre for the struggle among counterposed material interests’ (Ferrarotti 1996: 452). However, such struggle has itself become arguably more diversified in recent years. This is particularly in the emergent socio-economic patterns described above which have contributed to or reflect a fragmentation of class-based identities. Today, Stuart Hall (1988: 266) remarks,

Divisions, not solidarities, of class identification are the rule. There are large and significant sectors of the ‘working class’ as it really is today -- the unemployed, semi-skilled and unskilled, part-time workers, male and female, the low paid, black people, the ‘underclasses’...-- who no longer see themselves in a traditional Labour Way.

The diversification of minority group interests and indentifications -- what some writers have described as ‘the new pluralism’ -- has in many ways added a new, complex challenge to the nation-state (see Hirst 1994, McLennan 1995, Vertovec 1997a). Minority groups of all kinds have mobilised themselves and mastered the means of making publicly known their interests, a widespread phenomenon often phrased in terms of the politics of difference (see Young 1990), the politics of recognition (see Taylor 1992), or identity politics (see Calhoun 1994b). These relatively new political movements using parallel (or sometimes coalition) tactics are comprised not only by ethnic minorities, but by women, gays and lesbians, disabled persons, the aged and others. Economic and political restructurings and the forms of inequality associated with them have stimulated or deepened a consciousness of differential interests and identities, of heterogeneity rather than homogeneity.

While it is certainly too early to write the obituary of the nation-state (Tölölyan 1991), these days it is certainly on the defensive (Comaroff 1996). Especially compared with the kinds of overwhelming processes and forces described briefly above, immigration issues and immigrants become rather easy targets for defensive posturing.

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